Tested out the Samsung Windows Mixed Reality headset. I'll do the first impressions of the pros and cons if it vs vive, cons first.
Cons
- tracking doesn't work as well, losing tracking if your controllers are out of sight of the headset for too long. The headset can see a bit more range than you can see, and it seems to work okay if it's only out of sight for a couple of seconds.
- the boundary system (graphical indication you are near the edge of your play area) doesn't work as well for large play areas. Maybe there are some options i haven't found yet to fix this. On the vive, you get an image that effectively is like this
It's hidden when you are in the middle, when you get somewhat close to the edge, it appears. There is an option to leave the outline of the floor itself on all of the time. This works great in games where you want to move around a lot, like paintball.
Microsoft did it differently, their system only shows the floors and the lines to the ceiling at each corner. Then when you touch the wall, circles appear where you touch to show you're going through he wall.
The problem is when playing a game in a large area, you don't always see the corners or the floor lines, and a quick action in the game means going through the boundary before you even see anything. I hit my wall and made a mark and didn't even know what happened, I never noticed any indication I was close to the wall. And to make it even worse, the mark is right in the middle of my white painted wall that is my home theater screen, so now i have to hope that the place I hit isn't noticeable when I paint it.
All of the pictures i see online show a different boundary system, one that shows a patter of dots to indicate the boundary. I don't know if there is another option or if they changed the way it works. The new system should be fine for smaller areas, but is problematic for large areas. I also didn't see a way to keep the floor on at all times, this is a huge help with paintball.
- it's pretty close, but still doesn't work quite as well as I hoped for setting it up without a computer display. At an absolute minimum they need to change it so that you can click to next step with the controller instead of a mouse. But at least if you're in the same space, and the headset recognizes it, you can boot the computer, put on the headset and start up without touching a mouse or keyboard. However, when you set headset down for a while and put it back on, you have to hit a continue button with the mouse. They really need to get to the point where you don't need a display at all. This is true with Vive and WMR.
- while it supports SteamVR, the support is still beta, there were some glitches, and when SteamVR is running, there is a steam screen in your virtual world that lets you get back to steam, but it shows up in a random place in the home world.
- if you hit the windows button on the controller, even by accident, you are instantly taken back to your home environment and I didn't see a way to get back where you were, I'll have to look at this more. If it was a steam game, you can get back by finding the steam screen and clicking on it. But for the non steam content, it appears to have exited. On the Vive, the button in the same place just brings up a menu, but clicking again takes you back where you were.
- the cable is about 5 feet shorter. It had to move my computer to a different location and still couldn't quite reproduce my full play area.
Pros
- the "home" environment is a lot better than the SteamVR home. Instead of scrolling through menus to find the app you want to use, you can set representations of them in your world. You can also run any windows app as a screen in the world, including the windows desktop. I ran fox sports go and set up a giant 15 foot tall screen to watch the Cavs game on, then could walk around and try different things out during timeouts or halftime. I could still hear the game, but it sounded like you walked away from a real tv. So you could set up real world stuff, like email, web browser, etc, so you can check your email without having to leave the virtual environment.
- it runs some VR apps some of the other headsets don't. One is NextVR, which lets you sit court-side at some small number of NBA and NFL games. They have a live stream from a court-side VR camera. Some other headsets have this, but Vive and Oculus Rift don't.
- resolution is better than Vive or Oculus - it's the same as the Vive Pro. There is still some screen door effect, but the trend here is in the right direction, and should only get better and better for all VR.
- you can use voice control. Saying Go To Start takes you back to the home enviornment just like hitting the windows button.
a pro and con is that you don't have to use SteamVR at all, and a decent number of SteamVR games now don't require steam. It works a little better this way, but i can see things splintering even more. Ideally it wouldn't matter what VR headset you have, you should be able to use all of the VR apps.
Windows Mixed Reality doesn't require base stations, but as far as i can tell, it also doesn't allow them. I don't know why the system wasn't developed so it could work either way, let people optionally add base stations to get better controller tracking. Let the Vive or Rift run in Windows Mixed Reality.
And really the architecture should be designed so you could plug in things like the 360 degree treadmills and have them automatically work as an infinite play area for any app that lets you move around (like playing paintball in Rec Room).
The WMR systems are better for portability since you don't have to set up base stations, the Rift or Vive are better for large play areas.
But all in all, as someone who never even thought about buying a gaming computer, and someone who never buys windows computers, these things are so great that I may end up with two windows computers that only get used for VR. A second one so we can play multi-player player games against each other.
And these things are only going to get better and better. Screen resolution will get better, VR computers will get smaller and faster, more devices will get supported. They already have computers designed to wear on your back so you don't have to worry about the cable. Some day that compute power, including the tracking, could be in the headset.
I personally find the hand held controllers that are tracked a must, there are a bunch of cheaper ways to to VR that don't include or support that, like the upcoming Oculus Go. All of the things I'm enjoying the most require hand tracking - paintball, ping pong, tennis, boxing, etc.